


squint your eyes and hope real hard

by howlikeagod



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Anxiety, Anxiety Attacks, Character Study, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Dancing, Gen, Hospitalization, Siblings, at least like. in parts, mentions of underage drug and alcohol use, the boy...has been thru some Shit ok i promise this is happier than it sounds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-11-01 21:46:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17875430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howlikeagod/pseuds/howlikeagod
Summary: Benzaiten Steel was, for a time, alive.





	squint your eyes and hope real hard

**Author's Note:**

> Mind the warnings in the tags. Also, I love you.
> 
> Title from "Maybe Sprout Wings" by the Mountain Goats

_First Position._

Benzaiten Steel is four years old. He has not yet mastered _z_ sounds, so when he says his name he skips the second syllable entirely.

Today is the day he runs away from home.

He will not remember it later. His brother will remember. His mother will remember. A man whose next fabricated name and face will live a decade longer than Benzaiten himself will also remember. These three are irrelevant.

This is not a story about the future. This is a single, bright afternoon. It is a moment seen through the eyes of a four-year-old boy with no idea what consequences a single, bright afternoon can have.

Halcyon Park, unlike many districts of Hyperion City, has efficient public sanitation and well-maintained sidewalks. This is useful to Benzaiten, who did not put his shoes on before he left the apartment. Either his mother or his brother always helps him do up the buckles.

He will learn to put on his own shoes soon. He will learn many types of self-sufficiency sooner than he should have to. Again, this is not a story about the future.

Tiny, socked feet maketheir way down a white cement sidewalk. These socks are at the ends of a pair of tiny, brown legs in tiny, blue shorts below a tiny, brightly-colored Turbo t-shirt. It is Benzaiten’s favorite shirt. He has five of them. His brother has six.

Their mother promised to take them to the fountain. Their mother is not home, so Benzaiten decides that he will go to the fountain on his own. The park is not too far away. They have walked there as a family more times than Benzaiten can count.

They have been to the fountain several times. Benzaiten cannot count very high.

He stops for a while in someone’s front yard. The synthetic grass is taller here than it is in the carefully-maintained lot around their apartment building. Benzaiten sits down in the grass and runs his fingers through it. He imagines a tiny city with tiny people living somewhere under the green blanket of the grass, like on TV. 

On TV, there are places with tall trees that grow everywhere, not just in the park. The trees are so tall you cannot see through the canopies when you are very high up above the planet.

Benzaiten is vaguely aware that there are other planets. He knows that he lives on Mars. He knows that the nearest planet is Earth, which is where people and trees and cities all came from so long ago that nobody, not even Jack, is old enough to remember when it stopped being the only place where those things could be found.

He knows that planets are big. He knows that they are round. He knows that there is a lot of distance between them, and that distance is filled with nothing at all, not even air. Sometimes Benzaiten holds his breath, looks up at the sky, and pretends he is flying through all that nothing.

Benzaiten is still young enough that flying is its own reward. It is not yet an escape.

The fountain is nearly forgotten in the endless, miniscule jungle of the grass. A door opens behind Benzaiten. Footsteps much bigger than his own stocking-footed ones softly crunch across the lawn.

A shadow falls over Benzaiten’s grass forest. He looks up to see a woman in a pink dress. Gray hair falls over her shoulders and down her back.

“Are you lost?” she asks. “Where’s your parent?”

“’m gointa the fountain,” Benzaiten says. He smiles in the very wide way that makes adults smile back. 

He has an infectious smile, even so young. This, like the rest of the story, is an objective fact.

“You mean the park?” The woman is worried. She is no longer frowning, but she has not smiled.

Benzaiten does not answer, for he has remembered his quest. He pulls himself to his little feet and resumes his journey, newly refreshed and inspired by the world created in the grass. The fountain will be even more exciting.

The woman watches the small boy walk away. She does not know what to do. Calling the police seems drastic, but she has no way of knowing to whom this child belongs. In the end, she goes back inside but keeps an eye out through her living room window. The park is very close. He will be in her sight nearly the whole way there.

She leaves to do dishes after about fifteen minutes. She does not see the middle-aged man who will eventually carry the little boy back up the street. By evening, she forgets.

Within a week, the woman will hear about the plagiarism scandal at Northstar Entertainment. In a few months’ time, she will hear through the grapevine that the subject of said scandal was one of her very own neighbors, who has since moved away. She will not connect this at all to the little boy who played briefly in her yard and walked to the park in only his socks.

Two years later, she will see her granddaughter sit in the grass and suddenly remember the boy. He had a gorgeous smile. She will reassure herself that he made it home safely and that he is fine. No news, after all, must be good news.

This is not a story about incorrect assumptions.

Benzaiten steps in chewing gum further down the sidewalk. He does not understand the process by which laundry is done, but he understands the way his right foot sticks slightly to the ground with every step. He pulls the offending sock off and continues on his way.

When his family walks to the park, his mother always stops at the corner. She holds Benzaiten’s hand in one hand and Juno’s in the other. She tells them, “Look both ways,” and then they all cross the street together.

“Look both ways,” Benzaiten sings to himself. It is not a song, nor does it have a tune. Nevertheless, he sings it.

He looks both ways before crossing the street. Halfway across, he waves cheerily at the car coming toward him.

The vehicle’s thrusters shift into reverse so abruptly that the plastic asphalt of the street hisses. Benzaiten does not like the noise. He puts his hands over his ears and begins to run, up onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street. He forgets very soon why he began to run in the first place. It is a simple pleasure to move, to be fast.

He takes his hands away from his ears. His arms stick straight from either side of his body. Benzaiten takes a deep breath until his cheeks puff out, and he flies.

The fountain is in the center of the park. It is eight feet tall counting the high arc of the water shooting from the top. Its shape is in the abstract style of 40th-century underrealism, sides mirrored into asymmetrical symmetry. In the sunlight of this bright afternoon, it shines like a beacon.

Benzaiten arrives with his arms and eyes both open wide.

Sunlight dances off the water. Benzaiten leans over the edge and looks into the pool. It is clear all the way to the cement bottom. When he comes here with his family, his mother tells him the coins under the water are wishes.

Tiny hands search the tiny pockets of his blue shorts, only to come up empty. Benzaiten has no coins. The fountain, however, is full of them. If he reaches into the water, he will have a wish. This is his reasoning.

Coins wink in the sunlight several inches below where Benzaiten can reach. Even leaning as far as he can over the edge of the fountain’s base, the water only laps halfway up his palm.

There is a sign a few feet away that states clearly and simply: DO NOT CLIMB ON FOUNTAIN. Luckily for Benzaiten, he cannot read.

This is how Jack Takano finds him eighteen minutes later: sitting in the fountain, water up to his chest, giggling as he fishes coins out from the bottom and throws them back in. His now-filthy, single sock is soaked through, but his Turbo shirt may be salvageable. After today, it will not matter. Next week, his mother will stuff every piece of Turbo merchandise in their apartment into several large garbage bags and leave them on the curb.

Juno will want to keep just one Turbo doll. He will cry for two hours while their mother shouts. Benzaiten will sneak out the night before trash pickup on a mission to rescue that single Turbo.

In six years, Turbo will find a home in the nest of a rabbit in Oldtown’s sewers. This is not a story about nostalgia.

“Benzaiten,” says Jack. His voice is even, stern, and paternalistic. “Don’t you think we ought to take you home now?”

“Okay.” Benzaiten nods. He stands up in the water and reaches his arms out, trusting Jack with his four-year-old life because he does not know any better.

“You had your brother and I worried sick,” Jack scolds softly. “You can’t make a habit of flying off like that.”

They leave the park together. Benzaiten smiles at Jack Takano, whose face he is seeing for the last time. He does not look back at the fountain.

As the sun sets small and blue past the trees of the park, the fountain’s metal sheen catches the light. Its wide shape and the arcs of the water shine so brightly that they are indistinguishable for a single moment.

If anyone had seen the the fountain at just this moment, they might have thought it looked like a pair of wings.

 

_Second position._

Oldtown is different and Mom is different. They are different in many of the same ways: dirtier, hungrier, dangerous if you do not keep moving.

Benzaiten is good at moving. He moves in place: from one room to another when Mom comes in smelling like her office used to but sharper. He learns to spin on one foot. He learns to duck.

Juno moves, too, but not the way Benzaiten does. Four years on, it is his turn to run away.

“Where’s your brother?” Mom growls from her place on the sofa. Her leg extends across the second cushion but not the third, room enough for someone to sit with her.

Benzaiten does the math: open seat, open bottle of bourbon. He stays standing.

“I don’t know,” he answers.

It is the truth. Juno left hours ago down the fire escape—Mom threatened to seal their window shut the other day, but she has either forgotten or decided it is not worth the effort to trap them in their room anymore. He did not tell Benzaiten where he planned to go. Benzaiten is certain Juno didn’t know either.

“Little coward,” she spits. It takes Benzaiten a moment to figure out she is talking not to him, but about Juno. “Can’t even take a comment…”

Mom drinks deeply. She wipes her mouth, looks silently at her son for a few seconds, and shifts her leg off the sofa.

“Come sit with mommy,” Mom says. Her voice sounds almost the same, almost like Halcyon. She pats the cushion; it makes a crackling sound, half taped-over with old plastic bags to cover the foam peeking out.

Benzaiten goes. Warm, damp hands smooth over his hair and the side of his face. Mom is trying to touch him gently, but she pushes a little too hard. A hangnail gets caught in one of his curls. It hurts, a quick sting, when she yanks her fingers away.

“I’m worried about him, Mom,” Benzaiten confides. If Mom thinks about how anything could happen to Juno out there—something _really_ bad, something she can’t say is his own fault—she might be better for a while.

She might even say sorry. Benzaiten remembers the last time she apologized: the hole she put in the wall three inches from his face, two weeks ago. She let the two of them pick the radio station that night.

“Don’t be,” Mom says. It is almost soothing, until: “Maybe he stays gone, wouldn’t that be something.”

Benzaiten begins to shake. He does not notice the tears on his face until Mom scowls; it is the same look every time one of them cries.

“Do you mean it?” Benzaiten asks through the tears he finally manages to swallow. He is eight, a big kid. He can stop himself from crying.

“It’d be something, alright,” Mom says again. “But I still have you, Benzaiten.”

He nods. His bottom lip is pulled tight into his mouth. It is a trick he has learned to stop his chin from wobbling.

Mom plays with his hair again. It hurts. It would hurt more if he pulled away, he knows, so he stays as still as he can on the couch until Mom drops the bottle, drops her hand, and starts to snore.

Benzaiten brushes his teeth and puts on his pajamas. He and Juno usually help each other; the loss of routine makes it hard to sleep.

The next morning, Benzaiten is still alone in the bedroom he should be sharing. He wakes up too early; his eyes are gummy and they ache.

He does not fall asleep again. There is no clock in his line of sight while flat on his back in bed, but he counts the time by his heartbeats—imperfect, considering how fast they go by—and every passing second reminds him of how dark and sharp and strange the corners of Oldtown are. Juno is out there; Juno is alone.

By the time he ought to get up for school, Benzaiten is frayed at the ends and entirely certain his twin is dead in a gutter. Or worse. He does not know what _Or worse_ means, exactly, but there must be worse things and he knows without a shadow of a doubt that every single one of them has happened to Juno.

He pulls himself out of bed. Benzaiten is very good at moving.

“Mom?” Benzaiten calls quietly from his doorway. There is a sharp thud against the wall they share with neighbors and a series of footsteps overhead, but no answer from inside.

He moves down the hall as quietly as possible, still barefoot in his pajamas. Mom’s bedroom door is open, which means she is not in there. The kitchen is empty, the bathroom too, and the only evidence of her in the living room is the empty bourbon bottle from last night.

Benzaiten sits in the middle of the floor, alone in an empty apartment, and bawls his eyes out.

Every breath of air rubs raw against his throat by the time he calms down. Nothing is different, nothing has changed. His brother is bleeding out in the street and his mother is gone forever and he is missing school without so much as a note of excuse, which swells up bigger than it should and hangs over him like all the rest of it.

Despite the fear filling the apartment until there is no room for Benzaiten to breathe, he does not have the energy to cry anymore. His face feels swollen; he shakes like it is last winter again, when the heat turned off.

Benzaiten tugs a cushion off the couch and puts it on the floor in front of the TV. He curls up on top of it and presses the remote with shaking hands. This is what Juno would do for him, what he would do for Juno, when the other was lost like this.

He will have to do it himself from now on. He turns up the volume.

For half an hour, Benzaiten loses himself in reruns of loud and brightly-colored cartoons. Just as his heart begins to slow for the first time since he woke up, the commercial begins.

Playing on the screen, huge and reflected in Benzaiten’s wide, wet eyes, is an advertisement for the grand opening of Polaris Park.

Benzaiten remembers every word, though he has only seen it once. He remembers, because it was this same forty-five second snapshot of _The Place That Fun Calls Home_ which launched Mom into the tirade that sent Juno scrambling out the window yesterday.

The children in the commercial hold sword-shaped balloons and lick dragon popsicles. Juno would have loved it. He has always wanted to be Andromeda—Benzaiten has always been happy to let him, when they play. He prefers to be Draco anyway; the dragon can fly.

The TV screen goes black. Benzaiten’s little hands tremble around the remote control.

He is too afraid to move, but he does it anyway. He pushes himself off the cushion, puts it back on the sofa, and starts to make himself breakfast. The synth-milk jug is too big—or he is too small—to lift with one hand. With his lack of steadiness, cereal spills across the counter and milk soaks into the leg of his pajama pants.

Benzaiten cleans up his mess. He keeps moving.

Not long after he finishes his cereal, a key rattles in the front door. He has hopes, and then he has fears, and both are strong enough to leave him pacing instead of running—until the door opens, and there is Mom.

Benzaiten does not have the patience for careful mathematics in this moment of relief and joy. He runs to his mother and throws his arms around her waist, as high as he can reach.

“What the—? Benzaiten,” Mom says. She puts a hand on his shoulder and pushes him away. “Why the hell aren’t you in school?”

“You weren’t…” Benzaiten is afraid again, but Mom is back. She is here, a physical presence that means he is no longer alone. “I’m sorry.”

“No, _dammit,”_ Mom swears. She kneels down in front of him; there are heavy, dark bags under her eyes. She is in the same clothes she fell asleep in last night. “Don’t apologize. I… I forgot. Of course. _Stupid._ Go out looking for one little monster and leave the other one all by himself, and of course it’s the useless one you wasted all that time on—”

She has started talking to herself, so Benzaiten pulls away. Now that Mom is here, the only all-encompassing fear in him is for Juno. It grows even bigger than Benzaiten thought was possible at the contents of her furious muttering: she tried to find him, and couldn’t.

The car ride to school is silent. Mom’s eyes roam over the sidewalks and alleys they pass more than they focus on the road. Benzaiten keeps his eyes just as peeled.

It seems Juno is nowhere to be found.

That is, until that night, long after Benzaiten has gone to bed. 

A rattle and then a knocking against glass pulls him out of sleep. He looks up, sees a silhouette against the ambient orange neon outside. He takes a flying leap out of bed to throw the window open.

Juno tumbles inside. Before he can crawl into his bed, Benzaiten grabs him by the arm and pulls him into his own.

“Where’d you go?” Benzaiten whispers against his brother’s shoulder. He grabs a hand exactly the same size as his own and doesn’t let go.

“You wouldn’t believe me,” Juno yawns.

“Okay.” Benzaiten knows Juno will tell him eventually. “Juno?”

“Yeah?”

“When we grow up, we’re gonna go to Polaris Park.”

“Okay, Benten.”

 

_Third position._

“He fell.”

That’s all Sarah Steel says to the paramedics as they hoist her son onto a stretcher from the bottom of the apartment building’s staircase.

Well, really, she shouts it, over and over again, like this:

“He _fell._ He— He fell, he fell!”

She shouts because her son is also shouting as he is lifted, and even now she can’t resist the urge to talk over him.

She isn’t allowed in the ambulance. 

She raves about it, threatens the driver, and tries to grab one of the people holding her son up off the ground—her son who, until a minute ago, was splayed out and bent at a viscerally irreconcilable angle on the stained tile floor of the foyer. 

It takes an ultimatum to get her off their backs: _‘Drive to the hospital yourself, or ride there in the back of a cruiser. Your choice, lady.’_

“You’re a brave kid.”

“Huh?” Benten turns groggily toward the paramedic, who is currently two very blurry paramedics slightly overlapping one another. Benten is, coincidentally, on an enormous dose of painkillers.

“A lot of kids who get hurt that bad pass out,” they say. “Hell, some adults too. You didn’t even cry.”

“I’m good at… trouble.”

The paramedic laughs.

“I bet you are. You’ll be getting into trouble again in no time, okay? Just relax.”

“‘m relaxed, I’m _so_ relaxed,” Benten mumbles.

The relaxation doesn’t last long—Benten Steel has never been truly relaxed for a day in his short life. His peers and teachers and even his brother will call him _easy-going,_ and on some days he even believes it himself.

Most days, he does not.

This is, understandably, one of the days he does not. The next day is the same. 

It is another of what he assumes will be many, many days of that kind, because he is laid up in a hospital bed with the specter of agonizing pain looming over him every time he’s lucid and having caught just enough from the doctors his mother is bellowing at to know his dreams of joining the Oldtown High dance team next year might be a little more difficult than simply not getting nervous before tryouts.

He wishes Juno were here. He is, at the same time, glad Juno wasn’t there when it happened.

Benten wishes he could roll over and pull a pillow over his ears like he does at home. Every time he moves a muscle, his back seizes up like there’s an iron vice around his spine. He hasn’t tried to move anything below his hips at all.

“I don’t have the money for this,” Sarah Steel says. It’s one of the first intelligible sentences Benten has caught since he woke up—though that might have more to do with the fading painkillers than his mother’s articulation.

Benten registers a response from one of the doctors, and then:

“Who? Goddammit, tell me _who._ Who the hell paid for it, then? This is my kid we’re talking about, I have a right to— You think I give a damn about your donors? _Friends of the hospital_ my—” 

“Benza— Uh, Ben?” A polite medical intern with clear green eyes makes a haphazard attempt at pronouncing Benten’s full first name before she quickly gives in to the inevitable embarrassment one or the other of them must suffer.

If this were three days ago, Benten would have jumped in surprise. As it is, he jolts and then makes a sudden, wounded noise at the pain of it. He didn’t see the intern come in. He was too busy straining to hear his mother, despite or because of how terrified he is of what she’s talking about.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” the intern apologizes. “It’s time for your medicine, if you’re ready.”

“Can—” He swallows with a sticky, dry _click._ He needs some water. “Can I talk to my mom first?”

“She’s… busy.” The intern’s bright eyes flick to the doorway. She, like most rational people, is a little afraid of Sarah Steel.

Benten nods. He has lived his whole life with a mother who is too busy making people afraid of her one doorway away.

Prepping for surgery sucks. Benten is thirteen and lives in Oldtown, so he knows worse words than that. What he means is, prepping for surgery _fucking_ sucks. He is miserable and in pain and the hospital staff have stopped letting Sarah into his room like they threatened her with before, or maybe she’s lost interest. Either way, he’s by himself.

Benten hates being alone.

There are people in and out of his room all the time, of course. He gets blood drawn so many times the crook of his elbow goes mottled with bruises. He becomes better acquainted with the one-to-ten pain scale than he is with the Solar alphabet. The intern with the green eyes learns to say his name.

None of this is real company. Benten has only been touched clinically for days. He stares down into the hospital nutrient gelatin he has to drink through a straw and wants nothing but a hug.

He goes under, he gets a brand new spine that lights up like the shoes Juno’s friend Mick is so proud of, and he finds out he’s going to be on another month of bedrest at least. He adds to the list: a hug, a chance to stand up and stretch a little.

“Your body and the cybernetic system have to get to know each other,” a doctor explains. “It’ll take a while for them to become friends. It might hurt in the meantime, but eventually you’ll be able to move without pain again. Doesn’t that sound good, Benzaiten?”

“Yeah,” he says. He even manages a smile at the thought. Somewhere in the future, there’s a Benten who can dance again. From where he’s laying right now, it’s just as easy to imagine himself learning to fly.

At least he has practice.

Sarah is strange and wary around her son once he’s home. She doesn’t directly address the cybernetic if she can help it, but she follows the instructions of care the hospital sent home with her to the letter. For a while.

She gets lax. Benten gets better enough to be able to feed himself and change his own clothes, but he still needs help and is a smart enough kid not to expect his mother to remember the limits of his self-sufficiency.

Juno is a ball of rage. He’s always like that, but the day Benten comes home from the hospital with an inorganic slab of metal burrowing into his body and their mother insisting, again, “He _fell,_ Juno, just drop it,” he goes a little off the rails.

The apartment is a kiln, and Juno is made of hardening clay and building pressure. He comes by it honestly, which is why things explode the way they do.

“That’s not your job, little monster,” Sarah Steel spits in her son’s face. Not the son she pushed down the stairs, just the one she wants to. She is spitting venom because he’s adjusting Benten’s back brace, which is due to be loosened today.

“Didn’t see anybody else doing it,” Juno snaps back, and then it’s his head snapping back when Sarah backhands him without a moment’s hesitation.

“Mom!” Benten says. He says the word with more alarm than the event deserves, given its relative frequency.

Benten Steel has a condition rarely seen in this district of Hyperion City, and it’s called _the benefit of the doubt._ Symptoms include: believing people will change when they promise to; doing it again the next time they break that promise; mild rash; perpetual disappointment; perpetual hope.

Per usual, Sarah pulls her hand in against her chest like Juno’s face is a hot stovetop. His eyes burn as if that’s true.

“Whatever,” she grunts. “You had to outgrow me sometime, didn’t you? It might as well be now.”

“Mom,” Benten says again. “That’s not—”

Sarah Steel slams the door and locks it behind herself. 

Benten is getting just old enough to realize a bedroom door that locks from the outside isn’t a great sign of parental trust. Some teenagers are given their space and some are hovered over. He still can’t puzzle out which this counts as.

Juno finishes loosening the brace wordlessly. Even when Benten prompts him, he won’t look his brother in the eye.

“Are you sure you did this right, Super-Steel?” Benten does the half-twist motion outlined in his Home Healing Plan.

Or, he does a movement that he’s pretty sure is close enough to the one he’s supposed to be doing. The hospital gave him a lot of instructions, okay; he can’t be expected to keep track of all of them.

“I don’t know. Do I look like a spine doctor to you?”

“I think there’s a word for that.”

They stand in a beat of silence, putting all their collective brain power to the task of figuring out what the word for _spine doctor_ even is.

“It doesn’t matter.” Juno shrugs. “Does it feel better?”

“I don’t feel like I’m wearing a corset for lamp poles anymore, so that must be a good sign, right?”

For the next two days, Benten walks upright on his own two feet all by himself. His balance is still… _not,_ but nonetheless he feels a rush of freedom. He stretches his arms high above his head and gives his reluctant brother a bear hug.

The day after that, he’s flat on his back in bed again.

“I did it wrong,” Juno says with his hands in his own hair. “I ruined it.”

“Juno,” Benten groans, in too much pain to soothe someone else’s freakout, “shut up.”

That’s what sends Juno out again. He spent a lot of time with Mick and Sasha while Benten was in the hospital, and still more since he’s been home. Benten gets it, he does. It must be hard to watch him like this. He must be hard to be around.

Benten dozes off late in the afternoon. He’s woken in the evening by the sound of sirens.

This is a normal enough sound in Oldtown. When the ambulance drove off with Benten inside of it, there was no surprise on the part of their neighbors except at the fact that he was still alive.

When Juno gets home, he doesn’t turn the light on. The shape of his face is just visible in the dim room.

“Hey,” Benten whispers.

“Hey,” Juno whispers back. In just that one syllable, he can tell with their creepy twin certainty that something very bad has happened.

Juno doesn’t tell him. Juno, in fact, goes unsubtly out of his way not to tell him about any of it.

Benten goes back to school two weeks later and hears all about Annie Wire.

“Where are you off to?” Benten asks. 

He groans as he sits up. Juno looks back at him warily, shrugging on the big ratty jacket that he thinks makes him look cool. Benten is only ten months recovered from thinking mismatched colored contacts and hair straightened into stiff spikes are the epitome of _cool,_ so he shouldn’t judge. He doesn’t—but he teases.

“Out.”

“Not without me, you’re not.” Benten shoves himself up and swings his legs off the bed. “You have no idea how boring it is laying around while you go out and get—what’s the slang you and your friends use? Is it still cool to say _wasted_ or should I add some swears?”

“No,” Juno says. His arms fall to his sides like two deboned fish.

“No swears?”

 _“No,_ Benten. You’re—” Juno does a weird, asymmetrical thing with his mouth.

“No fun since my body broke?”

“Not coming with.”

“Try to stop me,” Benten wobbles a bit as he stands up, but he stays on his feet. 

“What are you gonna do?” Juno tilts his chin up because he thinks it makes him look taller when he’s being a brat. “Throw yourself down the stairs after me?”

“No, I’ll just be really, _really_ annoying until you bring me along.” Benten grins the Galaxy’s Best Smile. “You’re kind of stuck with me for life, Super-Steel.”

Juno stares at him. He says exactly this: nothing. 

Silence.

It’s been a long time since Benten felt wrong-footed around Juno. Juno is, in fact, the one person he always thought he would know the right steps for. But right now his face is at once tense and empty and his posture is different. _He’s_ different.

Benten looks at his twin and, for a second, doesn’t know who he is.

“Come on, Juno,” Benten tries again. “Isn’t there a whole thing about ‘pouring until you hit the floor’? I’ll be great at that.”

Juno still says nothing.

“At… hitting the floor. Get it?”

“Holy shit, Benzaiten.”

Juno’s voice sounds like someone took a power sander to his throat, and not in the normal way it cracks sometimes as it’s begun to deepen in the last year. Not the audible growing pains of the awkward time they’re both in the middle of; it’s something else Juno is clearly going through and would rather be on the other side of if it had to happen at all.

“What? I’m just trying to lighten the mood—” 

“No, you know what? I’m not going.” Juno gets tangled like an eel in a net in his own haste to throw the jacket off.

Benten’s laugh bursts out of him. He can’t help it, the sudden surge of disbelief at how stubborn his brother can be.

“You’re gonna stay home just so I can’t go out with you? Do you hear yourself?”

“I don’t want to go anymore.” Juno sits heavily on his bed, arms crossed. “Everyone can have fun without me.”

“Except me,” Benten says, “who is allowed to have zero fun?”

“I’m not stopping you,” Juno grumbles. “I’m just gonna stay home. Go if you want, or whatever.”

Benten cannot respond to that. He doesn’t know how.He’s young enough not to have the words for a lot of things, but old enough to be faced with the things for which there are no words. It’s frightening and impossible to escape without somebody getting hurt.

So, he responds to the situation like anyone would: an evening of passive-aggressively playing party music to drown out Juno’s equally passive-aggressive silence.

Nothing tires you out like constant pain. Benten has somehow not learned this, despite two months of wondering why even simple things feel suddenly so much harder, why he’s slept so much more. It isn’t his fault that he falls asleep.

He wakes up to an alarmed lecture from the part of him that exists only to describe the worst possible outcome of any given situation in graphic detail. Benten finds the courage to turn his head, and sees this:

Juno, sound asleep. 

Benten is still, righteously, pissed at him, but he closes his eyes with a smile on his face anyway.

He walks into the Oldtown High gymnasium, which smells like it and every other high school gymnasium in the galaxy all share a bathroom, with his head held high. The two seniors behind the card table look at him. 

Their eyes are so heavy it’s like someone dropped Olympus Mons on Benten’s head, but he glances over at the bleachers and gets an awkward thumbs-up from a slouching punk in a big, worn-out jacket whose smile, during its brief appearances, is a mirror of Benten’s own.

 

_Fourth position._

“Remember, Benzaiten,” the speech goes. “If you want to get mad at anyone, Ma’s not where you should start.”

“Isn’t she?” muttered from one mouth to another ear. Nothing stops the birthday toast once it begins.

“Most kids get to celebrate their birthdays. But what do we celebrate instead?”

A pair of eyes, rolled. The answer she is waiting for does not matter, but it is filled with as much mockery as the woman with the voice full of honey and vinegar will tolerate. 

“The day Juno,” says a boy searching for levity, “ruined—”

“That’s right. The day _Juno_ ruined everything. Just, traded our lives away because someone said _please._ And why’d he do it?”

The boy opens his mouth to give a response the woman will not want to hear. A hand swats his thigh under the table, where the woman cannot see.

The boy treats this like a joke; his brother knows a tightrope when he sees one.

“Because your twin brother’s about as smart as a sack of bricks that got hit over the head with another sack of bricks,” the first voice finishes with a laugh like winning at a game no one else wanted to play. “And we never.”

A hand, clutching another hand under the table.

“Let him.”

Two pairs of eyes, met. A silent, tiny shake of the head.

“Forget it.”

 

_Fifth position._

The dance studio is full of light—light falling in through the wide windows and bouncing off the long wall of mirrors, light in the eyes of students when they manage a difficult move, and light in the eyes of their teacher for the same reason.

A row of people along the mirror moves in an attempt at synchronicity. A merry chaos, dappling heights and ages: a recently-retired widow looking to get out of the house, a six-year-old in pigtails who looks at their teacher like he hung the moons, a pair of best friends with an _I will if you will_ agreement on afterschool activities. Together and one-by-one, they place their feet side-by-side with toes pointed to the other heel, heel against toe.

“Daphne, you’re so close,” the teacher encourages. “Just close that gap between your feet—perfect! You did it!”

Daphne’s braces come off in a week. The wire over her teeth catches the light as she smiles.

He wraps up class soon after. The afternoon light begins to fade into the blue of evening outside the pocket of warm yellow brightness of the studio. His students shuffle off, street shoes put back on in the area near the door, rides called for or offered.

“Mr. Steel?” asks a hesitant voice. He looks up to see Daphne again. Red-brown curls the color of Martian sand fall against her forehead. Freckles stand out there against her winter-paled tan skin.

“Mr. Steel is my brother,” he smiles. “I told you, call me Ben.”

“Okay.” She adjusts the shoulder strap of her duffle bag. “Ben. I—I don’t—I’m sorry. Here,” she digs around in her bag and pulls out a crumpled piece of notebook paper, “I wrote you a letter.”

“Uh, thanks.” The skin between his eyebrows wrinkles with gentle confusion. “Do you want me to read this now, or?”

“Yeah, it’s…” She gestures vaguely; her arm comes up and then falls in a movement like a marionette with a shoddy puppeteer. Her teacher feels concern on top of the confusion.

He opens the note.

“I… I’m sorry,” Ben says. “Thanks for letting me know. We’ll miss having you here, it won’t be the same without you.”

“Yeah, it’s just, my mom—” Daphne’s mouth twists. “She’s sick. She needs extra help with stuff now. But I… I don’t _want_ to quit. This is, like, the first thing in my life I’ve ever really, _really_ not wanted to quit.”

“Hey.” Ben reaches out to rest a hand on her shoulder. He isn’t tall, her teacher, but he has a presence. Every room he steps into feels filled by him, like light bouncing off mirrors. “I get that. I really do.”

“Really?” Daphne shuffles awkwardly. _“You_ don’t seem like you quit everything.”

“I don’t. But I understand how you feel.” He pauses, a breath, a moment of decision, then: “I still live with my mom.”

“Is she sick too?”

Another moment passes in the still air.

“Yep. And honestly, I want to quit sometimes too. But you make choices, you know?” Ben shrugs his dynamic shoulders and his whole form moves with them, a symphony of body language. “Sometimes the choice you make isn’t the one you want. And sometimes it’s not the right choice, if there even is a right choice.”

“There can be just wrong choices?” Daphne’s eyes go wide. Ben is less than a decade her elder, but for a moment that span of short years grows wider than the galaxy. She is so very young.

“It’s… not always like that, either.”

“Okay.” She doesn’t understand—or she understands in a way that cannot be articulated. “I have to catch my bus. Um.” Daphne hesitates again, before rushing forward and throwing her arms around Ben’s torso in the briefest and sincerest of hugs. “Thanks.”

“Thank _you._ And if you ever get the chance to come back to class,” Ben throws his arms out, silhouette of a man in his own domain delighted to share with any weary traveler, posed against the windows overlooking the city at dusk, “I’ll be right here.”

“I hope so.” Daphne’s curls bounce anxiously as she flies across the room. She changes her shoes in record time; the bus waits for no woman.

“Well,” he corrects himself while she does so, “I won’t be here _all_ the time. Just, you know, Tuesdays and Thursdays four-to-six. For this class. I have other classes too, if you want to learn the box step instead—”

“Thanks again, Mr. Steel,” Daphne laughs.

The door shuts behind her, and he is alone in a silent studio: a little box of light.

“Ben,” he sighs, rolling his eyes. “I tell them all to call me Ben, is that so hard?” He mutters without anger. Two steady hands zip up the duffel by his side.

He catches sight of his own face in the mirror. It’s so easy to fall into the habit of talking to himself around reflective surfaces. He huffs a laugh and sees his own smirk, over which he does not keep sole ownership.

Ben’s own bus back to Oldtown doesn’t come for another half an hour. He takes this time, as he often does, for himself: a quick stretch, poise, a deep breath, then—movement.

Benten Steel loves being alive.

He knows his brother doesn’t. He knows his mother doesn’t. He would be entirely justified in following their example, but he drags himself kicking and screaming into that love every day—not despite the things that make it hard, and not because of them, either.

He loves his life wholly and inarticulably. He loves it illogically. He loves it with purpose.

 _Fouette,_ spin after spin, he turns on one foot and feels the rotation of Mars around him. The momentum will run out eventually, but for as long as he can keep it up, each movement is a victory against gravity.

Each movement is like taking flight.


End file.
